The astounding rise of the world’s fintech market has generated a barrage of comments regarding the effect of fintech on the banking industry. The general opinion is that the constant progress of fintech will one day spell the end of the banking system as we know it. Personally, I have not paid much attention to such comments when they appear on Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, many influential consulting firms have recently joined in and their opinion is worth listening to.

By 2008 Russian banks had begun to sense that the new electronic payment services and micropayment systems (EPS) were posing a serious competitive threat in a field long monopolised by banks. As the new payment services offered the general public an extremely user-friendly system, they quickly came to garner a large chunk of the market for financial transactions. These included people sending money to each other for a variety of reasons, buying merchandise from online stores and paying for utilities and other services.

In both Soviet and post-Soviet times, bank cards were a thing of wonderment to the average Russian. Getting one’s wages or making purchases by using a plastic card, whether a credit card or a debit card, was nearly unheard of.